In spite of the Tube strike (which forced me to walk around London for an extra hour and a half this morning) I've just splashed out about £200 for a LiFePO4 12V 20Ah battery pack to add to my off-grid system which should double its capacity, but the new battery is a fraction of the size and weight of the old one, and in principle should last about 10x longer (3000 cycles vs 300). So even though it costs about twice what the old battery did, it still seems like a bargain.

But the software and hardware hacking to integrate it will be interesting for a number of reasons.

Well I bought myself a flute this week - and we bought ourselves a ping-pong table. The flute is great - and I'm ploughing through the "teach yourself" book pretty well (not sure anyone living in close proximity will agree ... ) - although I have to say, I'm not doing too badly, but I already play a few instruments - so just a case of remembering the different fingerings etc.

Ping-Pong table was a great buy - found it at a car boot for €40, spent €10 on new net - only to find that it didn't fit the brackets or type of table, and meant some slight "bodge-it-and-scarper" adjustments, but is now up and running. Many hours of fun had at the weekend. Mo (youngest dog) has been officially sacked as ball-girl - but fortunately we bought loads of ping-pong balls in anticipation of a "dog-strike"...

I'm aiming for flute solo out of Firth of Fifth by end of week. Then I will be a happy chappy. I'm nearly there - just not quite. But then again, I'm nearly there, but not quite on the piano part - and that's sort of been like that for about 5 years or so. Mmmm.

I do use rechargeable NiMH for C / AA / AAA batteries for all possible gadgets/toys/etc. But their round-trip efficiency and self-discharge are both horrible compared to Li batteries. And these LiFePO4 ones don't catch fire! B^>

I have an X-based package that I've been using, but (a) that diagram's not quite right anyway and (b) I may re-arrange things if magic smoke starts escaping and (c) I won't have much time until a new 100Wp solar panel arrives to be slotted in on Monday, at which point I hope to do some general housekeeping!

Rgds

Damon

PS. Correction: I did have the package on the previous laptop that died... Would have to reinstall it. So, if you can recommend a good, free, Mac package, please do!

Wow - that's pretty impressive...I refuse to have a mobile at all - still in the dark ages. I never seemed to have it when I needed it, or I'd switched it off or the battery was flat - and I always forgot to read messages - so finally cancelled it a year or so ago.

Installed a new solar panel today from the same people that I bought the Li battery from, and re-arranged the whole system to deliver about 1/3rd of the energy from the complete panel set to the new battery (and the wind turbine output FWIW), and the rest to the old/core system.

If this arrangement sticks then I'll draw up the schematic properly RSN...

(I'm at my new client's site for the next few days, which are due to be mainly cloudy, which will give the system a workout.)

Quite impressive power is delivered to the batteries when the sun is shining full-on at noon, enough to make some power rectifiers noticeably warm. (It would be enough to run all the lights in the house at once by a comfortable margin for example, I think.)